The Microsoft Online Services Service Update for March 2010 is currently being deployed into production data centers and is scheduled to be available to all customers in the next few weeks. Updates to the deployment status will be posted to the comments section of this blog post.

Upgrades and Enhancements

The following features and capabilities are included in this Service Update:

25GB Mailboxes for Exchange Online

All users with a Business Productivity Online Suite or Exchange Online Standard User Subscription License (USL) will now be allocated 25 GB of mailbox storage, a significant increase from the previously allotted 5 GB of mailbox storage. This expansion means that a BPOS customer with 10 users (Standard USLs) will now have 250 GB of total storage (10 users x 25 GB) instead of 50 GB (10 users x 5 GB).

While mailbox allocations for all existing users will increase to 25 GB, mailbox sizes will not change. In other words, an administrator will need to update an existing user's mailbox size to 25 GB in order to allocate increased storage to that user. For example, an existing user whose mailbox size was set to 1 GB by the administrator will continue to have a 1 GB mailbox size after this update unless the administrator changes that user's mailbox size. The maximum mailbox size is still 25 GB.

Because the new default allocation for a user is also the maximum amount of storage allowed for an Exchange Online mailbox, the Exchange Online Extra Storage SKU will no longer be available for purchase. Customers who have purchased the Exchange Online Extra Storage SKU will no longer be billed for extra storage.

Increased SharePoint Site Collection Maximum

With this Service Update, organizations will be able to create as many as 100 site collections in SharePoint Online. Previously, organizations were limited to a maximum of 20 SharePoint Online site collections.

Now a customer can provide their eNom domain hosting credentials in the new Domain Configuration Wizard in the Microsoft Online Administration Center, and the domain will automatically be configured to work with Microsoft Online Services. Or customers can choose to bypass the Wizard and configure their domain manually, depending on personal preference.

At the end of the Wizard configuration process, customers will receive a report of the domain records that existed prior to domain configuration, along with the additional domain records after domain configuration.

Microsoft Online Services is planning to add domain auto-configuration for other domain registrars in future releases.

File Attachments to Service Requests

Customers can now attach files to service requests, providing greater visibility to technical support engineers and significantly streamlining the troubleshooting process.

The maximum size for an individual file attachment is 5MB, and the maximum size for all files attached to a service request is 20MB. As many as 20 files can be attached per ticket.

Support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

The Mac Sign-In application now supports Mac OS X Snow Leopard. No update or changes are required for your users to take advantage of this enhanced support for Mac OS X.

Enhancements to Live Meeting Usage Report

Deleted users in the Usage Report available to administrators will now have "_Deleted" appended to the user, allowing administrators to distinguish between active and deleted users in the Usage Report.

Enhancements to Live Meeting Recording Publication Process

A number of improvements have been made to the process to publish Live Meeting recordings, including:

An update to the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In application has been released to the Microsoft Download Center. The update includes hotfixes two known issues.

Version 1.0.1423.65 of the Sign-In application was released on January 24. Customers that downloaded version 1.0.1423.65 between January 24 and today may experience the following issues:

·Machines running Windows XP may experience problems connecting to Microsoft Online Services, which may manifest with the following error message displayed in the Sign-In application:

“Unable to connect to Microsoft Online Services. You must be connected to the Internet to use the services.”

·Machines running Office Outlook in languages other than English may display Outlook folder names in English.

Customers who downloaded and installed version 1.0.1423.65 of the Sign-In application and experience either of these issues should install the new version 1.0.1427.040 (or later) of the Sign-In application, which can be obtained from the Microsoft Download Center.

Customers can quickly determine the current version of their Sign-In application by selecting the “About” tab in the Sign-In application. The version is listed as: “Current version: x.x.xxxx.xxx.”

If you’d like to find out more about Microsoft Online Services and Microsoft’s Cloud Services in general, check out the Cloud Services Experts Blog. I’ve posted a few articles there, one with lots of links to good information about Microsoft’s Cloud Services story and Steve Ballmer’s recent “We’re All In” speech.

Two other contributors are Brett Hill, who writes the BPOSitive blog, and Steve Clayton who writes the Geek in Disguise blog.

I’ve also noticed that InformationWeek has some thoughtful articles on Cloud Computing. Just click informationweekand search for Cloud.

If you know of other Cloud Computing articles that are worth reading, post a comment and let us know.